Sam rolled over and felt the heavy weight of the warm plastic slip slowly off his leg.

The sack of chemically activated ice had gotten as useful as room temperature about an hour ago but his knee hadn’t stopped throbbing. The cure all his brother had suggested hadn’t quite done the trick. A half glass of whiskey with a five aspirin chaser hadn’t done much besides leave him queasy and on the outside edge of any real sleep. However, everything else on his body was reasonably distanced with the powerful lull of alcohol on an empty stomach.

Everything but what actually hurt in the first place.

Carefully testing his leg, he bent it so he could hold his hands around the swollen flesh around his knee cap. Squeezing down until it made his eyes water seemed like some way to hasten along the healing process. With a groan of frustration he dug his thumbs into the purple and blue bruising that radiated in an almost pleasing pattern up onto his thigh. Placing his leg back gingerly onto the sloppy pyramid of extra cushions, he rolled his head dismally to the closed curtain of the window. With a small whimper he dragged one of the stray pillows over his face and pushed the sides down over his ears.

The horn out in the parking lot had been going off in blaring ten second intervals.

Sam found himself tapping his finger for each beat between the bouts of tenuous silence. The progression was kind of lackadaisical compared to the usual spastic forms of alert he’d had the misfortune to experience over the years. There was a terrible blissful pause that lasted just long enough to give the cruel and briefest hope that it might be over. But the next relentless searing blast of unpleasant noise came along exactly on schedule.

He looked over at the bed on the opposite side of the room. Dean had claimed the side that had the better full on view of the small television and had fallen asleep watching it sometime in the early morning. A news hour had replaced the night long marathon of horrible slash flicks that would never be considered charming enough to gain cult status. The low cheerful murmurs of the dawn anchor team predicting traffic was as soothing as the dry rumble of the air conditioner. Another blistering discharge of the horn sounded right on its steady cycle. His brother hadn’t so much as twitched since the moment the torture had started. Sam looked despairingly at his watch.

23 minutes ago.

He hadn’t liked the sight of the offending car since they had pulled into the motel’s cramped parking lot. It had been parked with two wheels just shy over the yellow lines making the space next to it unusable. The color of it had made him stare at it whenever he had to walk by its compact small shape. The shade of blue reminded him of 1980s music videos and that weird shock of his laptop screen right before it stuttered into the screensaver. The model of it was marginally outdated in a style that would never create its insufficiency into a classic. Convertibles had never made any sense to him anyway, the purpose of a vehicle being a practical tool in his upbringing and not a huge source of recreation. Unless of course you got off on yanking spark plugs but he knew that tiny sports car didn’t have anything hidden under the hood that would impress anyone in his family.

He knew the weak V-8 engine wasn’t sitting directly one foot from his face but it certainly felt like it.

Dean was suddenly up.

Sam blinked at the abrupt change of state from sound motionless sleep to conscious and standing. His brother’s body was a little ahead of his brain but it didn’t take him long to figure out where he was. Hair flattened completely on the one side of his head, Dean unsteadily stretched as he made his way half blind to the door. Clad only in some Christmas themed boxer shorts, he exited right out into the bright morning sun. Sam flinched when the door shut, miserably noting his new found susceptibility to all sudden noise.

There were plenty of reasons to step outside. The soda machines were filled with caffeine and there were even free papers to be had. Sometimes the motel office had some gas station grade coffee and stale powdered donuts. Treating a frigid morning parking lot like your living room wasn’t anything either one of them hadn’t done before. Sam realized he had started jerking in response to the anticipated but startling sound of the horn. He wondered how much longer it could actually continue before he started pounding his head into the drywall in accompaniment. There had to be a circle of hell like this. Some nebulous place where you had to lay still and wait for a measure of perfect unerring time for the repeated harsh racket to bore through your skull for the rest of eternity. Using two pillows instead of the inadequate one, he muffled the steady honk that rang out across the land again and again and again—

Dragging the pillows away in hesitant disbelief, he listened nervously when the ten second mark passed and there was nothing.

Unwilling to trust that it could possibly be over he waited for the system to hiccup back into its maddening warning of doom. Another minute passed. And then another. Sam felt his tensed muscles start to relax, the unnoticed clench in his jaw releasing as he finally found some glimmer of slumber start to nicely fog his weary mind. He was peacefully drifting right towards full on black out when the door opened again. Cracking his eyes back open, he watched his brother yawn and make a beeline right back for the bed he left. Sam heard the springs creak with the return of his limp weight. For some reason, the event of Dean’s absence coinciding with the cease of unparalleled anguish suddenly seemed suspect.

“Did-did you turn it off?” Sam groggily wondered.

Dean flipped around on the crap mattress a few times before settling back under the blankets. Getting wound up in his previous cozy cocoon, he worked his face down into his pillow and looked ready to fall right back into the dream where he’d left off. But from the rapid descent into total shut down, he managed a blurry reply to Sam’s inquiry.

“Nah.” Dean mumbled. “It’s not off.”

Sam half dozed in the peaceful quiet and adjusted his leg into the least painful position he could devise. His listened as Dean’s voice trailed off into near incoherency as sleep took over.

“—j-just underwater.”

Sam’s thoughts turned serenely to the trench like retention pond that sat murky and brown at the end of the lot. With no natural runoff it was deep and stagnant, a rainbow film of gasoline and mosquito larva glistening on its surface. A gentle smile of certainty settled nicely over his face. He had always believed strongly that it was always a good idea to make sure your car had a really reliable and persistent security system.